MTN partners with Unacast to Help Mitigate COVID-19 in Nigeria

To help mitigate the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, Unacast, a location platform and analytics firm, and MTN Nigeria, the leading mobile telecommunications provider, today announced a partnership in which the two will use privacy-friendly, aggregated and anonymized, human mobility insights derived from MTN’s network data, to make available a version of Unacast’s recognized and widely used COVID-19 Social Distancing Scoreboard for Nigerian citizens and officials. Together, the companies will provide this easy-to-use dataset on a pro-bono basis to enable public officials, public health leaders and other organizations, and the public itself to understand and convey the importance of social distancing in fighting the spread of COVID-19.

The Social Distancing Scoreboard shows human mobility data across the US. The partnership between MTN and Unacast will make the Social Distancing Scoreboard available for Nigeria to help public & private enterprise, public health, NGOs, and governments make data driven decisions during the pandemic.

The measure comes at a time when Nigeria’s healthcare system is strained with managing rising cases and protective equipment shortages. Human mobility insights from Unacast’s Social Distancing Scoreboard will enable African public officials and the population to make informed and proactive decisions when navigating COVID-19 across regions. And, as the Nigerian economy continues to grow, Unacast’s human mobility platform will also allow African decision makers to access data-driven insights for urban planning and development including real estate, retail, transportation, research and more.

The Social Distancing Scoreboard will leverage Unacast’s Turbine platform for aggregated and anonymized telecommunication data via MTN. Specifically designed for telecommunications companies, Turbine turns raw location data from mobile networks to privacy-safe, anonymized, and aggregated human mobility insights. The technology allows end users to distill vast datasets that accurately understand human mobility across a large area like Nigeria.

Unacast and MTN have developed the COVID-19 Social Distancing Scoreboard using anonymous aggregate mobility and device data from tens of millions of devices. Unacast’s proprietary technology then extrapolates the results to show trends by region. As with all Unacast technology, the Social Distancing Scoreboard follows local privacy guidelines, like the Nigerian Data Protection Regulation.

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